This post was taken from the 'No Holds Barred Witchcraft' FB Group, originally published on 12th Feb 2021.
Sometimes it’s like the helpless are being led by the clueless, but who can blame the helpless, when the clueless seem to be getting some results, and spins a nice tale, after all a broken clock is right twice a day and even crap witches can make the odd spell work sometimes.
Ok, so one of the most popular questions from mundanes (and I've been talking to alot of them lately) is ‘how do I get started on my magical path?’
Many magical lodges, covens, traditions and mentors have a curriculum (although some are looser than others), they teach new initiates enough to be useful or at the very least give them a simple workable system of magic which I can respect. After all, us people who grew up in the Western World are used to a Western schooling system where there is a curriculum and you are supposed to learn a bunch of stuff and regurgitate it lol.
Here’s Liam’s ™ part, I think this system has a lot to answer for lol. As some may know I work for the ‘Thoth Witchcraft Shop’ and find myself doing a lot of mentoring. I’ve worked with and mentored some great magical practitioners, but I've also met and mentored lots of complete idiots. I shouldn’t call them idiots as it’s not really their fault, I mean yes you get the ones who aren’t willing to put the work in, and I think of them as idiots, but there are many who I have met who have and do put the work in, but have had really bad mentors, and have been raised within crappy covens and magical lodges created and run by inept practitioners lol.
In no way would I pick on any specific traditions as I've met inept people who call themselves Wiccans, Traditional Witches, Druids, Bards and of course my favorite Master Reiki Practitioners (the list is much longer but you get the gist.)
The problem with magical traditions is that they aren’t all magical at the core. Some have an emphasis on magic, but many don’t. From a mundane’s perspective, they may see a bunch of Pagans holding rituals and talking about magic and think that they know what they're doing and have reached what we could call average magical ability, maybe even a foundation in magic.
The problem is that they might not have, and the seeker or initiate may spend a considerable amount of time buying crappy books, learning rules and philosophies and going through the whole rigamarole of an initiation only to think it was all a load of crap and move on to the next mentor or group after a few years.
So what’s the alternative? What the hell do we do then Liam? After all, isn't that the only way to progress by buying books and joining random groups until we learn something? Don’t we just look for people who seem to be walking the walk and talking the talk like a #GymBro lol?
Well this is not how we work, when we take on a mentee we have no curriculum. What we instead do is work more like a personal trainer. We ask the client or mentee ‘What do you want? and ‘What’s your long term goal?’
If they can’t give us something to aim for in the form of a long term goal then we tell them to go away and think about it. Now what that long term goal is could be anything. Some of the most popular are:
Make lots of money
Learn what happens after humans die
Understand how the human soul works
Defeat a magical foe (either human or spirit)
Learn to summon and communicate with spirits
Learn the secrets of astral projection and the astral realm
Find out if there is such as thing as ‘the meaning of life’
Those are all goals that someone could pick and of course our mentees aren’t just limited to picking one of those.
So why do we start with the picking of a goal?
Well it’s simple. Everything we teach them will be getting them one step closer to their goal.
An example I like to use to explain this process is, imagine a person has a goal of wanting to renovate a house. You wouldn’t tell them to enroll in an apprenticeship and go to trade school and learn a specific trade, because that would take years and years and they wouldn’t have made a start on their actual dream or renovating that house they just bought.
What we would do is say ‘here is an old wreck of a house, what needs doing to it?’ Starting with the foundations ‘what needs to be repaired or replaced?’ If the floorboards all need changing then they might start by learning basic carpentry so they can replace all those floor boards, etc
Eventually by the time they get to the end of the renovation project, they will have a number of tools and skills and all of them were needed and were picked up along the road to getting to their goal.
When we mentor people then this is the same sort of approach we take. If the long term goal of the client was to understand how the Human Soul works then we would get them to share with us their current understanding of the mechanics of the soul, and then set them little mini projects which will push this knowledge further.
Perhaps the person can see auras and energetic centers, well if that's the case then we would get them to start dissecting them and taking them apart, We would help them peel back each layer and help them refine their schematic of the Human Soul lol.
What we wouldn’t do is what religion tends to do and that’s tell them how it apparently all is and how everything is supposed to work. We will set up and give them the right magical experiments for them to be able to obtain knowledge themselves through gnosis.
I’m not sure where this post is going now, but how many people do you think buy a gym membership and look up fitness model youtube videos in the hope of finding someone’s path to copy?
They look at someone and say to themselves ‘they must know what they're talking about, look at them’ lol. The truth of the matter is that many of the people who we see teach don’t give the full knowledge and don’t really tell them how they themselves got there. Many people on youtube selling fitness programmes sell cookie cutter crappy programs which won't get you your dream body and have used all sorts of drugs to get themselves there lol.
Many dark magicians get to their knowledge level through years and years of (or potentially multiple lifetime's worth of) practice, and will only train someone in order to get them to a level that is useful to themselves (they train useful slaves lol.) Of course there are also those who buy a Wiccan Diploma Course from the Center of Excellence and think they know enough to start teaching.
I suppose the take away from this massive post is, ‘Do you have something you're working towards?’ and if so ‘Is your mentor actually helping you get there?’
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